ABSTRACT
This chapter will deploy The New Inn and The Magnetic Lady as case studies for that exploration. John Dryden’s posthumous dismissal of Jonson’s late plays as ‘dotages’ has been much cited in scholarly considerations of the playwright’s Caroline drama. Anne Barton’s influential studies of Jonson’s Caroline canon established a reading of these plays as essentially retrospective in spirit: harking back in their social and political nostalgia, as well as in their manifest interest in the conventions of Shakespearean romantic comedy, to the age of Elizabeth. These sensitive and sensitised depictions are achieved at a spatial, topographical, and representational level in the Caroline plays. This observation provides a key to the relevance of the dramaturgy of these play-texts to the work of contemporary writers discussed in detail elsewhere in this volume.
